Darkdawn--Book Three of the Nevernight Chronicle by Jay Kristoff

Author:Jay Kristoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

CHAPTER 26

PROMISES

Mia had put Valdyr’s greatcoat on, but refused to wash his blood off.

She sat in a tall chair at one end of a long table, red gore crusting on porcelain skin. To her right sat Cloud Corleone and BigJon, looking like they’d each aged twenty years in the last ten minutes. Tric loomed at her right side, bare-chested, glowering. Without his robe, Mia saw fresh rends on his body: stab wounds in his belly, across the muscles in his arms, three in the flesh around his heart. She could see the flush of life plainly in his skin now, blood glittering in the new wounds, she was sure of it. But his arms were still spattered to the elbows with a black as dark as night, eyes gleaming like that pool of godsblood beneath the ’Grave.

Sid, Bladesinger, and Butcher stood around Mia’s chair, and Ash sat to her left with Jonnen on her lap. When he’d first set eyes on her after she’d butchered Valdyr, her little brother had simply looked at her and smiled.

“Well played, de’lai.”

At the other end of the table sat Ulfr Sigursson, a little paler beneath the handsome. Other members of the wulfguard were gathered around him, black-clad and tense as bowstrings, looking somewhere between shocked and murderous.

Mia could hear the chaos in the chamber outside. Captains howling at each other across the Hall of Scoundrels, scuffles and faint curses and breaking glass.

Mia’s eyes were locked on Sigursson’s, her stare cool and even. Blood was coagulating on her skin, in her hair and eyelashes and under her fingernails. All her lessons from Shahiid Aalea were ringing in her head. She knew the next sixty seconds would utterly define her relationship with this man. That, at its heart, this was a game of blink. The first person to speak was showing their weakness. Their fear. And watching the wheels turning behind this man’s eyes—former right hand of the king she’d just murdered, and now ostensibly her first mate—she was damned if she’d blink first.

Claim a man’s life, you claim all he was.

His ship. His crew. His throne.

She imagined being first mate to the King of Scoundrels would’ve been a job with certain benefits—that Sigursson had wielded power any other privateer in this city would have envied. And being part of Valdyr’s crew, the rest of the wulfguard would’ve stood top of the pile in the dungheap that was Amai. Looking across the table at all of them, Mia knew each of these brigands was doing the math in their heads.

They accept me for now, and keep their place atop the mountain.

They reject me, and let one of the captains outside try for the throne.

Or one of them kills me.

Eclipse prowled in a slow circle around the wulfguard, black as the furs about their shoulders. The room was lit by arkemical lanterns on the walls, and Mia let the shadows curl and writhe. Stretching across the table toward Valdyr’s men, her own shadow on the wall reaching out to Sigursson with translucent hands.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.